Discuss those experiences and much more all chronicled in her new more of the story, a reporters journey. The book covers the full span of judys long accomplished career in journalism nearly three decades of which are with the New York Times. She joined the papers Washington Bureau in 1977 as and spent the mid 1980s abroad and Carolyn Parrish returned to washington to serve as an editor. Stories about Osama Bin Laden and al qaeda that she and a small team of others did in 2,001 four command immediately after the 911 attacks one of Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. Going right up to the iraq war in the months after the 2,003 invasion judy wrote a number of highprofile articles about an audible that later turned out to be based on information. She came under fire by many critics outside and inside the times reporting. In 2004 and five she ended up embroiled in further controversy this time over the plane case which children nearly three months the defending reporters right to protect sources and refusing to testify before grand jury. In late 2,005 judy left the times. In 2008 she joined fox news is a commentator and is also now an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute make intruding editor of the institutes magazine and the theater reporter the tablet magazine. That i get that right . The other critic. The story is judys gift book. Others of dont with biological weapons the first gulf war holocaust. Judy is just embarking we are talking in the office. She happens to pick such lighthearted. Lighthearted. Lighthearted subjects. Judy story or stories really raise important questions about the practice of journalism relationships between reporters and sources between reporters and editors, especially when classified are highly Sensitive Information is involved in decisions about whether to take a nation to war are at stake. So there. So theres certainly a lot to discuss ceiling. Judy will be in conversation with an old friend of mine and of judys and a talented Foreign Correspondent and Foreign Editor during his 20 years with the washington post. He went on to lead the Transatlantic Center of the German Marshall Fund the American Council on germany commanders and recently became a senior fellow the brookings and served as a senior advisor. Ladies ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming judy miller. [applauding] quakes thank you very much for that kind introduction. It is a pleasure to be in the company of good friends and to mark the occasion of judys latest book. I thought start out with just some softball questions about how you got into journalism because im sure well have plenty of time going to the audience to talk about some of the more controversial aspects. I suppose everybody behind every journalist there is a series of mentors or inspirational people. I understand you started in journalism with the progressive publication out of Madison Wisconsin at the height of the protests against vietnam, larry stern was a close friend and editor. Tell me a little bit about that early phase of your career. Well, back then i was a graduate student who had decided that i was never going to be an economist because it was too boring for me. And since i hated the sight of blood i could not see a doctor. I i thought journalism was an interesting way to spend ones life. But i started doing freelance stories. Princetons Woodrow Wilson school, was a graduate student. I started out started out in israel got really helped. The arabisraeli conflict. In those days people forgot we had to go to cyprus because there was no direct connection between israel and any arab country. Lewis our personal went to egypt. People told me there would be a war. Was not reading that in the american papers. I went to jordan. I try to interview him with a tape recorder and did not know how it worked. He won. New line of starting it for me and that became the beginning of the very longstanding and i admired him enormously. And then routed syria. I came back to preston and decided i really did not want to do economics. I wanted to be a journalist. A journalist. Woodward and bernstein were the heroes of the day. I came i came to washington to try to get a job and found a progressive. In early mentor of mine was i have stone. He was nothing if not skeptical. He was mr. Skepticism. And just remembered probably would say every day everyday when i go to hell was some problem or challenge that only the government can solve he would say, just remember, they will all live it doesnt matter. They all lie and they always will. The only thing you can you can depend on is what they put in their documents sometimes. He would go through them religiously. He was a great source of inspiration. So when i got to the times was hired at the New York Times because of affirmative action. The women of the women of the New York Times three years earlier had sued the paper for sexual discrimination. I have to tell you the case was rocksolid. There were no women columnists no women. On and on. There were three women out of 35 people. And all of a sudden people like me began being hired. It was my it was my good fortune to come along at the right time but i always wanted to go back to the middle east and write about them at least. In 1982 i was center. Another mentor and inspiration along with bill safire conservative columnist with whom i adamantly disagreed. We agreed on only one thing the importance of journalism to keeping americans informed. On that we agreed. That is something we share. Since that was your first big foreign assignment how did that change your perspective as a person your views about the middle east and also the way to cover it is a journalist. I think what i have discovered when i was a student was not the story often times wasnt a major story that everybody was writing about. It was about in israel this group called duchenne benin the first group of people to form illegal settlements. And yet i think i wrote one of the first early pieces for the progressive before i even joined the times about the importance of people who felt that the land was more important than the walk. And i saw great peril in this approach and wrote that then when i got to egypt fulltime the first big story i had was not in egypt it was in beirut in 1983 when the marine compound was blown up. That is when i counterterrorism for the first time in my life. And i beirut. Beirut rather than have a nice area that had been a bomb site roped off it was over chaos and i flaunted israel because lebanon was closed. In a closed all the borders will close the airport tall but but i flew to israel and persuade the lebanese friend who went back and forth to take me with him. I got there just as don as they were digging out american bodies the rubble. And that was the first time i understood what we were up against. No one we offered the story of the smiling shiite driver in a yellow mercedes that smiled as he drove to the compound doors. We did not understand what that was about. It will be a long time before we understood what she had is believed about the afterlife and how important it would be to do something memorable an important. So my interest in islamic militancy began which directed the rest of my reporting for the next 20 years clicks if i recall correctly i think the suicide bomber was guided from tehran. Tehran absolutely. Those early days of has blah clicks has blah was just being formed. There was a lot of misinformation and a lot of us wrote stories that turned out to be partly true not true. It was very hard to figure out what was going on in that very chaotic time but i but i knew as i was standing on that day in the rubble that this was not going to stop with their. Lo and lo and behold two months later i was standing in another rubble of the American Embassy in kuwait. Fortunately nobody was killed because the area where the suicide bomber had come through was a place where the chancery were people stopped working. There was. They were usually lucky that more americans were killed there but i but i would see it again and again and again and different groups that we tended to lump together with one term islamic fundamentalists david all different. They were motivated by some of the same things but all politics are local. So we had to go to each country to figure out what motivated that particular group. So in your report you found that the causes were different for this kind of suicidal maniacal kind of Islamic Jihad . The goal was the same to establish the caliphate for the restoration of islamic rule. The method, the grievances the method of organization, the way emo is different everywhere. For example,. For example people always said that israel was a really important factor. Well, it was if you are in the west bank or gaza or an area in a refugee camp. But if i went to morocco and algeria they really didnt care about israel. It was just not a factor in what they wanted to do. And and so i began to be enormously wary about these broad generalizations which led to my book i got has 99 names. I always love that about islam. There are actually 100, but one is unknown. Once again it was the broad generalization that frightened me except there was one thing that the critics and the people who worried about a got right. Do not think this will stand middle east. This will not be confined in the middle east they were right about that place mustve been particularly difficult as a woman reporter, a woman reporter western western woman reporter covering the middle east. Were there hidden advantages . There were many hidden advantages. Not only did i i get my job through affirmative action, but in those days when you were at risk only because you are tall but women werent kidnapped and more killed. It was arab chivalry islamic chivalry. They did not do to us what they did to some of you. And there was also kind of what i called the saudi us c syndrome where you would go in saudi arabia where women could not drive plan to sit in the back of the bus. I did that. Its not fun because the back of the bus is not airconditioned and 120 degrees. I cant really work with men we all know the conditions now. But i i was an honorary man for the time that i was there. And the saudi trained american trained saudi officials would bend over backwards to show how enlightened and western they were. I had extraordinary access because i was a woman. So this gender thing plays both ways. Always a generalization that tends to be wrong. What interested you can weapons of mass distraction . Wrote about biological warfare. The happy subject. [laughter] you seem to be drawn to grisly ways of dying. And you know it it was so crazy because i have been so blessed. My life was really lucky. I had a i had a wealthy want talented father, brother who is a great musician grew up comfortable. But i grew up part of the time in las vegas where my father own nightclubs and ran nightclubs. I did i did not realize until the time 70 back to las vegas after 2,001 to look at what we were using the Nevada Test Site and to write a series of articles. I did not realize that i have actually and that is what i remember this. I have actually grown up during the time there for about four years of openair testing. And i remembered seeing one of the tests. Tests. I mean, las vegas remember, is only 60 miles away from the site where we did most of our aboveground testing. Most of our underground testing. And i remember a a bomb very much being a part of my childhood my resources in the book. I begged my mother to take us to jcpenney which had just donated a set of clothing that was going to be used in the apple bombing the pentagon wanted to see what would happen to manikins who were dressed up in regular clothes inside the houses they built which you can still see today if you go out the Nevada Test Site. I have chores which i highly recommend. And you saw, you know, they detonated a bomb and you saw the manikins. Some of the manikins are gone but they have pictures of what was left and it was actually and absolutely horrific scene. The atomic testing the Atomic Testing Museum in las vegas actually lets you sit on the bench for our soldiers did and feel the rumble of the earth. They they have recreated that and what the sky looked like. All of a sudden it came back to me and i realized where i realized where my interest in weapons of mass destruction that come from undermine the fact that we were systematically lied to. I was part of the reason. I knew i knew a lot of what we were told was not right. Hence some of my early pieces were very skeptical of National Security justifications the weapons we were developing, neutron bomb things like that. If you connected to your interest in the middle east are start asking yourself what would happen if suicidal religious fanatics get his or her hands on weapons of mass distraction . That is when it occurred to me. Then in 1991 when i got i got trapped in saudi arabia i was not chosen to be part of the team that covered the war was interviewing prominent saudis when the war broke out and they closed their airspace. I was trapped there for three months. The men sent all of their wives and families to a place that saddam would never bomb. I finally had a chance to really talk to saudis and unguarded moment where they felt vulnerable. I knew that if saddam one they were in big trouble. It gave me an insight into saudi arabia i had never had before. I remember one of them telling me about this mad saudi named Osama Bin Laden very wealthy family who was running around with his charts and graphs showing how we did not need the infidels. We we didnt need these people. Get them out of here. They are soiling our holy land command we can fight this war ourselves. And then i encountered him by reputation again afghanistan when i went in as a guest of the taliban to see what life under the taliban was like. And that would have been when . Clicks 1991 was the war and i want to taliban afghanistan in 2,000 before 2,001. And it was in afghanistan that bin laden and others the mujahedin have been trained. By him. By American Special forces. I dont know if we trained his group group, but we trained mujahedin like, and i remember having an argument with a great friend of mine who wanted to be here, she is traveling today a superb diplomat, ambassador francis kirk have been given a tour of the taliban sorry, the mujahedin that the cia was Training Command she said boy, these are my kind of holy warriors. Herne are saying you know i am just really nervous about the notion of any holy warrior because they tend to forget that all the virtue and wisdom are not other side, this could be problematic for us and i had encountered them in egypt because they were blowing up government ministries and government officials there. So i knew how this translated command i was always worried about it. And ive badgered the times and letting me do this series on this guy al qaeda with my good friend and colleague, former colleague jeff kerr. We did the first piece for the New York Times. I think he was in 1997 im not sure about Osama Bin Laden becoming more than a financier but an operator after. Right. That whole phenomenon of blowback was very impressively reported. Wonderful book. Well, then there was a time when he was actually consider the socalled friend of the United States. Were you covering him in those days the early 80s . Donald rumsfeld went to baghdad and asked how we could help in terms of the fighting. Saddam was then touted as a socialist secular bulwark against the spread of islamic fundamentalism. Absolutely. What did you think in those days . My first trip was in 1976 or 1977 when saddam was there but had not quite it was consolidating power. And as much and as much as i was suspicious of islamic militants, i really did not like saddam because every writer was under pressure or in jail. Any dissident, any artist. I mean, even people who had galleries were terrified of omaha brought. It would come in contact with a wanted. It was a nightmare from the beginning. And each time i went back command i went about 20 times because i have the misfortune of covering the iraniraq war while was in egypt. It just got worse and worse. And then functions went on. People, children begin to starve. It was an absolute mess. One of the first series another series of articles i worked on with the inimitable bill broad was a great science reporter for the New York Times is coauthor of my next book germs and biological weapons looked at the biological Weapons Program and weirdly enough that was the program that he had the longest. It wasnt the nukes. We we did not realize that he destroyed them after israel had bombed his reactor but that they never were able to rebuild the program. But the biology is very important him. So bill and so bill and i got to work with International Inspectors who had come back from iraq, they were telling us about the program which resulted in another interesting investigation. But after watching saddam for so many years he couldve told me the sun rose in the east and set in the west and i would not have believed it. He was a monster, just the human rights grounds alone. I could not figure out why the United States was embracing clicks what been led you must attract his efforts to acquire weapons of mass instruction, particularly in covering the iraniraq war was already using chemical weapons than and eventually against his own people. Our under that he was using insecticide against the bases you were coming across the marshes in the south and south and then finally against his own people, the kurds in the north. Yeah. Which is another massacre i covered. Clicks tell us a little bit about that. Documented that very well. A great great man for helping to get the iraqi official government documents of that massacre as the iraqis were kind of like the germans. They took exquisite records of everything. So they have these they were proud of what they called on file their campaign, the Genocidal Campaign against the kurds and had documented in detail village by village, house by house for what was used where, where how it was delivered, how many caves there were. It was just terrific. And for me i i wrote a frontpage cover story based on those documents which peter got me some answers to the dia and Human Rights Watch were working together to translate these documents and get the word out about the iraqi genocide. I remember seeing pictures. I had left by then id on the one of the sites. I remember seeing pictures of this woman who had been taken out of the grave. She was still frozen holding her baby both of them frozen in time. I thought this guy is beyond the pale. There was resolution after resolution after resolution. Saddam always thought that he could buy off the west brought the russians seduce the germans and the europeans with lucrative contracts. By and large he was right. Quakes about ten or 15 minutes. I want to open up to questions from the audience. In the interest of time. Actually, we have a little longer than that. We can start opening up. Please ask a question. We will enough time for everybody to have a shot at this. Who would like to start. Right here. I actually came here expecting to hear more about your problems with the deceit and the pressures that you felt when you are trying to report on weapons of mass instruction. In other words, it is as important for us to understand ourselves in our own deceit and that is what i was really hoping you would talk about. One other part of that if there is ever going to be any sense of proper operation and governing anywhere at anytime there has to be some higher level of openness and light into what is going on. Because we are fed stuff. We cannot make good decisions if we dont see what is going on in these offices and that these lunches and so forth. That really anytime i governing person is dealing with governing matters, that should be accessible to us commanded is not. Far far from it. Clicks you have touched on one of the big challenges for any journalist have to penetrate the deceit that one gets from Public Officials who are either trying to cover it up to protect their own record or just simply to lie. Wwor and they make a guess at programs that someone rio watching has. And they get it wrong. Part of what had been a am part of what i write about in the book is there was pressure on these analysts the not the kind people think they believed it. But they knew the program and they knew the history but beyond that they believe it because the last time and then saddam turned out to be close to a nuclear bomb. And they were not going to underestimate whom i had dealt with since the first artist to read about debbie randy about the bin Audit Program and by a alternately right about the soviet union and the fact that the cia had missed a program that in dozens of institutions throughout russia the they had not understood the depth of the program until they said this is really bad. If you are that analysts in government and some much depends on you after 9 11 will you underestimate or tell the president you have to worry. For so wrong you know, that guy . But they said they lied people died. It is so hard to figure this out and can have a lot of confidence even now that we would get that right. If you want to ask a question. It is independent of journalists but less the same to statement with the acquiring of partisan bias and the reason i asked that question is it seems more timely now. Is that obsolete or naive if that is the case . It seems it is the bigger problem over time than any 1. Of the time if you assume to be biased even gently so there may be a tendency to accelerate. It is getting to be the obsolete assumption. But you know, you are reading leftofcenter publication and. And fox news incorrectly in my view for those that work there. The amount of reporters that there is but lets get to a hour question. That standard of objectivity of course, we all have the of biases. But the New York Times model of a journalism in that which is taught in our schools is you tried to compensate for a personal bias dash bias to be driven because of the explosion of social media the mix between fact based journalism is disappearing and you are entitled to your own opinion beaver not entitled to your own fax but today it seems that you are then you get a highly polarized society with the other side of journalism per car really want to explore that problem it is very hard. I still believe that knowing you will not get their asking a series of questions that will drive you to the fact but my first foray with almost anything almost always contain errors and you have to keep going back what you learn the first of the second for the third time as the story evolves in changes especially with the intelligence world you get a little bit of information then you find out this cia had the aluminum tube from jordan now they are examining that. Then the president is told there is high confidence for the air iranian centrifuge program then you find out there is a debate whether or not that is true and the real crime is not that theres something wrong but sticking with your story when you know, that it is wrong. That is another reason i am very upset because now we have three reports that says there is no evidence that anyone deliberately lied and why americans want to believe that the Intelligence Community saved them is the separate question. But the point you raise about journalism i am very worried about the trend to be better informed today then we were. I dont really have a question but a debate point dash was that the center. I dont know what to do. Does this work . I was on 60 minutes there was is the enormous pressure to confirm there were weapons of mass destruction especially the mobile biological weapons lab. I have to end a half feet of paper proving and it has been reported that in fact there was a lot of pressure swy will not getaway that it was wrong it was politicized some got a wrong some got right but they figured out how to validate i think it went to zero courage. Can you identify yourself . Margaret henhawk. I thought so but for everybody else there was enormous pressure with rumsfeld wanted a war on with wolfowitz and i want not to listen and somebody tell me there wasnt i was there for two years to read read the commission report. Beyond classified one is not correct. Read the reports and try your own conclusions. There were all people to disagree about intelligence. Some were not convinced by that that the question i would ask that colin powell i asked. He would not talk to me for my book there a number of people who did not and they claimed to be doubters. I would have tried to talk to you if i knew about those mobile labs but they would either not talk over not confirm. But the book called leadership by found it very moving he said he gets serious now when he hears about people that validate intelligence it he asked the question where were these people when we were going to war . Where these people when dissent would have mattered . That is his account. [inaudible conversations] ken other countries as well there were debates of the of the veracity of this intelligence. But they all cable to savor a conclusion. But when i went back to interview to the english and a British Intelligence and Israeli Intelligence whether or not you wanted to go to war or if the policy makers wanted to, they were not deeply divided about the debut md what they disagreed whether are not that was the cause to go to war crimes. I think there is a rewriting of history of white americans were actually told the for the mcclatchy papers wrote a very good article on aluminum tubes and they knew that from the New York Times but five days after michael and i wrote the story about the aluminum tubes we learned about the debate and we broach that story to put it in the New York Times and yes i would like that to have bet on the front page but it was not. [laughter] i know if you are involved in the debate at the time you feel strongly and you may have felt pressure but so many people like me what we had to go one is what we could get at that moment and subsequently the finding of the difference panels getting a wrong was just as bad. Like the case involving curve ball where the german intelligence said dont trust the guy. I am not them all saying that but it is not accurate at all spec once again people have different memories but he was an analyst. I think it is important you should write to the article or the classified information. Where is your article about classified information . Seven above to read that because i have got a scene that. I wrote that on the mobile biological labs which i was indebted in the lab said turned out to be for the rockets. But they were convinced with the analyst added as they were taking the measurements that the is the labs were for biological production. So we wrote the first jury about that then cia issued the white paper then rewrote that then i went back to iraq in june shoot talk to people of. David kelly the british biological analyst who told me the cia has a wrong. And david kay who went on the weapons hunt said as sure as im standing here got their run. He got a wrong. So then we did a third article that said one bell labs appeared to be for weather balloons. To talk about mistakes that i made it is important that the Intelligence Community makes to not make them again. But when you stop doing that in stop going back to ask questions then you fall into a convenient patterns from a ideological preference and it is really important every now and then for all of us to get out of our comfort zone. So i showed you how little was put together and i talk to the people who would not talk to me who said why would you talk to me . At least one of them is in in this room. [laughter] i tried to go back and look at the story aftertime vitarelli hope your article and others ted years from now someone else will go back to take a different look and have a greater in the state a understanding. But whether or not it was justified which is why it is so important. We only have a few minutes left i will is just a group policy you with the question is. I just wanted to shift the controversy of battery plume as you explain what you did there also to have a related question. What i did i do and never wrote about valerie claman. I dont believe my job who is to have agents prefer other people whod do that can do that but that is not my job. I was told about her pretty early on but i was so consumed when i came back about how we got this wrong i had been out there with searching day after day hundreds of places they visited coming up dry. We dug from fighter jets the iraqis hit everything. But i came back with a list of questions why the intelligence was so wrong but then i came across a reference to Valerie Plame it happened in the New York Times her husband had written a story an oped article that said he had run into nature to let the intelligence reports that the administration was lying. So i began investigating if that was true and i learned about foul reclaim. I thought i learned about it with a failed intelligence it was only years later that i discovered that my testimony was wrong because i misinterpreted the very, very brief notes that i had of her in my notebook i felt horrible and consumed with guilt i testified against cuter libya definitely did not learn from him but from what remember either and what i had done is one of the most common memories but he was never permitted to offer to the jury and almost every witness you can see differences between what they told the grand jury or the fbi. Via very open about my views with this but once it was determined by the sec ought cia long before the indictments there was no damage to her or National Security or any source at home or abroad that investigation should have ended the because there was a special prosecutor it went on and on and on and it consumed a huge amount of government time because i subsequently learned that very early was one of the few people who said this war is going south unless we shift strategies and just as he was trying to make the case he was taken out by the Scooter Libby investigation. It is an interesting case the man who leaked her name not once but several times if you look at the conversation, he says several times thats my story during think that is a story . Interesting story. He was never indicted. I dont know why. Is one of those that would not talk to me along with Patrick Fitzgerald with to put me in jail. [laughter] so now we have to close out the questioning. For people leaked to the idea of valerie flame but only one was indicted. You are absolutely right. And no one was ever charged to leak the name. Because they could not prove. It was the judge that said you have to lay a foundation in of the Expert Witness to testify and he would not testify for his own defense so your key testimony you said when you met with him on june 23rd to discuss with the uranium then says that that point he said he worked with the sub Agency Proposal that was not correct . Direct no. He did not tell me that. Those references were incorrect and i told his gerald that it was to remember to ask someone i was interviewing a question about information i have already heard and the second was something that was interesting that the interviewee was saying. Is still in the weeds but the first reference was the wife works at bureau question mark. But Scooter Libby had leaked the name to meet tuesday at the agency he never said she was not at the bureau because that is cia. But the state department was recovered had of bureau the person who initially who told me was that the state department cia used the word piro i remember that after learning her cover one. It was never provided to me or Scooter Libbys to read that contradicts the other key statement they said to have the notes before. There were two conversations and that is the second conversation is. The whole plant of the book store richet well stick around to answer questions. But memories are faulty. One reason i wrote the book is set wanted to tell what i now know and learned about this could delay the case the more i thought it was a travesty with so much going on in our country at that time. The final question then we will break off she will be around to autograph. Little off topic relates to the conversation come i am interested given in your experience in the middle east have reduced to just we do this accordance with the rand . [laughter] we dont need you to stay for breakfast. [laughter] it is a short answer. What do we know about their motivation . I dont what he intends to have 190,000 centrifuge by 2020 i dunno what his real capabilities are. He has two facilities that he hid and rightabout. On fox news i take a position i will not support an agreement i have not seen any thought that interim agreement was in our country is interested it has worked out well but i think we have to wait and see what the president comes up with. And i know at the moment the ayatollah is not making getting any easier. From what we do about iraq. And i am not actively reporting that. Spee there is more of materials in in the book then we hope that you buy it here. [laughter] thanks for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] moi